Tor, I2P, and HyphaNet - The Comparison

1. Core Purpose & Design Philosophy

Tor (The Onion Router)
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Primary goal: Low latency, anonymous web browsing and TCP-based services such as SSH or email.
Design: Traffic is mixed through a chain of volunteer relays (entry - middle - exit) to hide source and destination.
Audience: Users who want to browse the public internet anonymously (journalists, activists, everyday privacy-concerned people).

I2P (Invisible Internet Project)
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Primary goal: Truly anonymous, peer-to-peer communication and hidden services that stay entirely inside its own overlay network.
Design: Uses "garlic routing," bundling many messages together; all traffic remains within I2P.
Audience: Users needing private, persistent services (messaging, file sharing) that never touch the clearnet.

HyphaNet
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Primary goal: A decentralized, censorship resistant social platform where content is stored and shared anonymously.
Design: Combines a distributed hash table (DHT) with end-to-end encryption and onion routing for content distribution and interaction.
Audience: Communities seeking an anonymous social media experience (posts, comments, files).

2. Network Architecture

Tor
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Routing method: Onion routing; each relay removes one layer of encryption. Relay types: Guard (entry), middle, and exit relays. Exit relays connect to the regular Internet.
Exit points: Yes : exit relays expose traffic to the clearnet (optional). Address space: .onion hidden services (16 character base32).
Scalability: Depends on volunteer relays; bandwidth can become a bottleneck at popular exits.

I2P
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Routing method: Garlic routing bundles many cloves (messages) together;
each hop decrypts its portion.
Relay types: Inbound tunnels (receive) and outbound tunnels (send); all tunnels stay inside the network.
Exit points: None : everything terminates inside I2P; external sites can be reached via "outproxy" bridges.
Address space: .i2p hidden services (base64-encoded strings).
Scalability: Designed for high concurrency; tunnels are short (about three hops) and can be numerous.

HyphaNet
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Routing method: Hybrid onion-garlic routing, similar to I2P's garlic but also s